Does Poverty Alone Keep Children Out of School? The Case of Children Under Kinship Care in the Philippines

While the importance of child education is universally recognized, there are still millions of children who are out of school in developing countries. In these countries, many children are left in the care of their kin when their parents die or work abroad. In this paper, we examine the welfare, particularly the school attendance, of the children under kinship care in the Philippines. Culled from the last seven rounds of an official national household survey, our dataset comprises 1,485 households with at least two members who are 6–12 years old, and one of them is the household head’s child or grandchild and the other is the head’s kin. Applying probit regression models, we find that a child under kinship care is about 3 % points less likely than the head’s own child to be attending school, other things being constant. However, there are no statistically significant differences in the likelihood of school attendance between the head’s own child and grandchild. While income deprivation keeps some children out of school, ensuring their schooling participation would require more transfers than are needed to lift their households out of poverty. Targeting these children through conditional cash transfer programs could mitigate the effect of the apparent parental bias toward their own brood.